'Fiesta of "illegals"' tries sarcasm, gets criticism

September 17, 2009

Billed as a "fiesta of `illegals,'" the event this evening was meant as a sarcastic jab at a much-hated word among immigrant groups wanting to mark national "citizenship day" by highlighting the success of community leaders who were at one time in the U.S. "illegally."

But before the party on the Near West Side even kicked off, Latino immigrant chat groups blasted organizers for being insensitive, with one e-mail asking a Spanish version of the proverb "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

"That word [illegal] is not a joke and shouldn't be used as a joke," said Juan Andres Mora, an immigrant activist who, like others, worried the event could be misinterpreted as a celebration of illegal Mexican immigration. "It's in bad taste and it's foolish."

The unexpected backlash to the event, sponsored by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, spoke to the sensitive image of an immigration reform movement that has both benefited from and suffered under its mostly Mexican identity.

With Mexicans the largest single group behind legal and illegal immigration during the past 20 years, they've become an easy target of scorn by Americans resentful of illegal border crossings -- a bitterness made more intense by the Mexican-driven immigration marches that set fire to the reform movement in 2006.

As such, the word "illegal" has taken on ever worse connotations. Shortened from "illegal alien" into a pronoun some use to describe the nearly 12 million people in the country without legal status, many Mexican immigrants equate "illegal" with other ethnic slurs.

"I don't want to hear that word any more in front of my family," said Salvador Pedroza, president of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce, who arrived legally to the U.S. when he was 15 and, though included in the event's program, considered its billing offensive. "What really [angered] me is that, in this case, our own people are using it."

Artemio Arreola, a Mexican native who is political director at the Illinois Coalition, said the event was intended to show that, if given a chance at legal status, many people here illegally can become productive citizens.

"We want them to come out and say: `Do I seem `illegal?' No, right? So, let's leave behind the [negative] myth attached to those who are asking for documents," Arreola said before the event.